She would stand in purple darkness, back pressed against one of the marble pillars supporting the window’s arch, and strain her ears to catch scraps of conversation as they drifted up through the purple leaves and white flowers of the citrus trees. In Constantinople, somebody was always listening.

And then, some strange, lingering sense of wrongness resolved itself into a realization. The people at this party were strange. They were all slightly too long and slender in the limbs and body. They all moved the same way, with the same liquid nonchalance.

But on one night – it was late in the fall, I think – a foreign sound leaked into my father’s left ear, the one with the hearing aid. He took out the device and shook it, a habit that seemed to help, like the way you might hit an old radio to get it back to its senses. But when he put it back in, the sound didn’t disappear; if anything, it became a little clearer.

She looked down at her drink, and tilted it to watch the fluid stick to the sides of the glass. She wrinkled her nose. He’d said it was “Bessenjenniver,” a specialty, and the bartender had poured her a thick shot in a yellowed tumbler, after unscrewing the cap and tearing open a crust of old sugar. For this, he had charged the absurd sum of 35 cents.